What harm can it do? The emotional cost of asking for something in academia

18 February 2020 by Leave a comment

Kylie Smith is Assistant Professor and the Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow for Nursing and the Humanities in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing at Emory University in Atlanta.

She is a historian, not a nurse, and loves working with nurses as colleagues and students.

Kylie teaches history, ethics and social justice to nurses, and undertakes research on the history of psychiatry. She tweets from @drkyliesmith. Her ORCID is 0000-0002-9249-0355. 

 

Photo by Keagan Henman | unsplash.com

In academia, people tell you all the time to just go ahead and ask for what you need. ‘What harm can it do?’, they ask. Or, being a woman, they say, “Think what a man would do and do that”, as though it’s literally that easy.

Of course, it should be that easy, but we all know that it’s not.

It’s well understood that women are socialised to undervalue our authority, to put other people’s needs ahead of our own, to think we are not worth what we are actually worth, to not want to be a bother, a burden, or to annoy people by asking. And we all know we should just be our feminist hero selves and get over it, as studies repeatedly show how embedded sexism is in the academy. Sometimes, though, there’s more going on than just gender socialisation.

A recent experience of mine demonstrated how many layers there are to a simple ‘ask for what you need’ instance, and how much more there is to overcome than what society has already told you. For me, I realised how much my own emotional baggage shaped my fears, and how very realistic fears generated by the deliberate precarity of the academic workplace make it genuinely hard to ask for what we need. Read more of this post

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Romance your writing

11 February 2020 by 2 Comments

James Burford is a Lecturer in Research Education and Development at La Trobe University.

He researches too many things. 

Recent preoccupations include: academic conferences, academic mobility, gender and sexuality in education and the felt experience of doctoral education.

Tweet him @jiaburford and find his writing at the blog he co-edits with Emily Henderson, Conference Inference. His ORCID is 0000-0002-0707-7401.

Photo by Element5 Digital | unsplash.com

Recently, I found myself sitting on a panel offering advice to graduate researchers who are trying to finish their theses. Even though I wrote my own PhD about the feelings involved in writing a PhD, it is easy to feel inadequate to the task of advice-giving.

Theses are so intricate, so specific, so personally transformative, that you are never entirely sure if you and another becoming-doctor are even talking about the same kind of thing! (See my thesis here, and a blog post about it here)

Sitting on this panel, I decided to be as honest as I could about the lumpy rhythm of my own doctoral experience.

My doctoral life involved multiple moves of house, city and country. It was punctuated by a relationship break-up and new love, part-time then full-time work at universities, and intense care work for a sick relative, which resulted in changes to my candidature (see more on this here – subscription required). My doctoral research was also intellectually challenging in ways I never really anticipated, leaving my brain bent into new shapes and leading me to question beliefs I’d long attached myself to. It is, as many doctoral education researchers have written, as if an important threshold (subscription required) has been crossed. There is no going back to pre-PhD me. Read more of this post

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The bestest of plans

4 February 2020 by 2 Comments

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski | unsplash.com

Welcome to 2020! I hope you managed a break of some form because we know that rest and recuperation matter. For me, it was good to kick back and disconnect from the work-a-day load and anxieties, and focus on recharging in my own way – here’s how I went.

Seeing the year out in 2019 with a few scholarly ‘presents’ from Twitter colleagues was lovely. If you missed them, here are two to check out: Bronwyn Eager’s Academic Paper Tracker and Pat Thomson’s Checklist for revising methods chapters.

Every year, many people make resolutions and commit to habits that they hope will make them happier, more productive, healthier, and/or a combination of these.

Miraculously, some of these survive more than a few weeks. Most, however, do not. Read more of this post

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Recharging the Research Whisperer way

10 December 2019 by 4 Comments

Photo by Andrew Benz | unsplash.com

It seems we’ve come to the end of the year, even though we feel like it’s barely been 2019! Could it be that time flew because we were having fun? Or was it because we were in a year-long frenzy of doing All the Things, and we’ve not had the chance to look up?

We think it’s probably a bit of both. We thought we’d do our good buddy Narelle Lemon proud and devote our reflections for this end-of-year post to how we are planning to cut loose from the work and renew our energy over the holiday break.

In Australia, universities have a set shut-down period (usually about a week or so, depending on when public holidays fall), and many staff take recreation leave to extend their time away.

Some academics don’t set foot on campus again till well into the next year; a lot of them are feverishly working on major grants and research writing throughout this time. Some colleagues have the bare minimum of a holiday and are back into teaching ASAP (whether it’s picking up summer school duties or international intensives). Some scholars have no academic work until the next semester – and no wage.

We are both in continuing jobs, and have the privilege of annual leave. Here’s what we’re aiming for. Read more of this post

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Once more unto the breach

3 December 2019 by 1 Comment

Image from pasukaru76 on Flickr | Public Domain

Image from pasukaru76 on Flickr | Public Domain

I am a researcher developer in an academic role.

In my field in Australia, this situation of being an academic appointment in a research education/development role is not that common. In my unit, all four of the research educators are academic appointments and we are all active researchers. This is rare.

Many research education and development units are staffed with professional roles, often with academic collaboration and input. It is a field where staff come from a very diverse range of disciplines, and often show up conceiving of it as an “accidental career pathway”. I first realised how prevalent this feeling was when reading my colleague Jeanette Fyffe’s 2018 paper on becoming an academic developer (yes, I’m pushing academic developer and researcher developer into the same bucket and I realise I may well be cursed for life…). Many who are in the researcher development field are PhD-qualified. For some professional staff in these roles, the researcher identity is one that becomes increasingly a remembered or historical one. For academic staff in these roles, the researcher identity is ongoing and always freshly fraught.

This post isn’t to set one against the other as superior (however and whichever way you may think they might be superior), but to talk about how it feels right now to be an academic in a researcher development role. I’m discussing this with the background of having been consecutively in roles there were research-only >>professional >>teaching/research.

Being an academic in researcher development feels like I sit partway between a more standard discipline academic role and a professional one. Across all the jobs I’m talking about for this post, I have stayed in the university sector but felt the pressures around it in differentiated ways. Read more of this post

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Forging your post-PhD, during your PhD

26 November 2019 by 1 Comment

Dr Wade Kelly is the Senior Coordinator, Research Impact, at La Trobe University, in Melbourne, Australia.

Wade’s PhD research focused on how and why universities and academics engage with communities.

This is Wade’s personal website and he tweets from @wadekelly.

Photo by Wade Kelly – used with permission

I am, perhaps, a unique creature in academia, an avowed extrovert.

Being around others recharges me and gives me energy.

That said, the prospect of cold-contacting people has never been a thrilling proposition. I once had a survival job working at a call centre that conducted surveys. I realised very quickly how little I liked cold calls. At the end of each call another number would appear on the screen then auto-dial. As I heard the tones through my headset another lump would emerge in my throat — over and over.

The work was soul sucking. I only lasted two weeks. There are jobs you do to pay the bills and hope that you never have to do again, and that was one. It turns out, however, that the skills I acquired during my brief stint in a call centre would come in handy down the road over a decade later!

This post is about how I built skills during my PhD for the post-PhD job search.

In late 2014, I gave up my permanent position as an instructional designer at the University of Alberta to start a PhD in Australia. I was back to square one at the bottom of the hierarchical heap. I left the security of a job, home, family, and friends and found myself in regional New South Wales, Australia, in a town called Wagga Wagga. There, I quickly found that if you wanted something done, it was easiest to pick up the phone. People would sometimes take weeks and even months (six months for one memorable email) to respond by email, but phones were answered immediately. Learning to pick up the phone again was but one of the strategies I identified and employed early in my PhD and throughout.

Early in my PhD program my supervisor encouraged me to insisted that I complete a 3-year plan. It was the first week of my PhD and I didn’t know where to start, but her eye was already on graduation and beyond. She knew that in order to get the most out of the PhD beyond your time as a PhD student, you had to make the most of your time as a PhD student. My plan included stuff about writing the thesis, outreach and engagement, teaching, committee work, post-PhD job-searching, and much more. Read more of this post

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Translating technology: Infrastructure literacy for researchers

19 November 2019 by Leave a comment

Sara in StockholmSara King is an eResearch Analyst with Australia’s academic and research network provider, AARNet. She has extensive experience in researcher engagement and training, with expertise in research data and technologies in the Humanities and Social Science (HASS) research areas.

She has built this expertise through university lecturing, working with libraries and as a curator for the National Archives of Australia.

Sara is building networks to lower barriers to digital research methods and tools. You can find her on Twitter at @sarasrking. Her ORCID is 0000-0003-3199-5592.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao | unsplash.com

Do you wonder about the difference between coding and programming? Are you new to these concepts?

If you hear the word kernel, do you think about corn before you think about computing? Do you have maths trauma, believe in the ‘geek’ gene, stare blankly at people who mention operating systems, the command line or bandwidth?

Or maybe you think smart phones are ‘magic’ and that a ‘black box’ is an aviation term?

In short, does technology give you the heebie jeebies and you’d rather not think about it?

We need to talk.

This year I started a new job. Like really new. A job my dad doesn’t understand. After almost 10 years working in archives, I came to Australia’s Academic and Research Network (AARNet) with a bag full of 20th century skills like map handling and retrieving paper records from storage.

Before that I worked in a library. Before that I did a PhD, well before Research Data Management was a thing, just as libraries and archives had started digitising collection items. I wouldn’t call myself technical, but after working with digital materials as a curator, I got a little bit of a bug. Later on I heard about ‘Digital Humanities’ and worked on a ‘Digital Treasures’ project, curated some online exhibitions and dealt with some eye-poppingly large archival quality audiovisual files that took days to upload. The potential of digitised collections in research got me really excited.

In 2018, I was lucky to work with the Tinker team, creating the beginning of a digital lab for Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences (HASS) research, and supporting collecting institutions to work more closely with researchers. During that year I learnt the term ‘tech curious’ which described me to a tee. Read more of this post

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